Red Wall
Project status: in post-production
A documentary on parliamentary socialism set in the Durham Coalfield - where it was built and where it has broken.
Director: Matt James Smith
Status: most of the primary material is shot; the film is in structural and editorial development
Target completion: summer 2027 - in the run-up to the next general election and ten years after Laura Pidcock entered Parliament
The project
Red Wall asks whether socialism can exist within Parliament and what happens to those who try to take it there. The film works through that question in the Durham Coalfield via the experience of Laura Pidcock - Labour MP for North West Durham from 2017 to 2019, Shadow Secretary of State for Employment Rights and one of the more visible socialist voices of the Corbyn years.
Laura lost her seat in December 2019 by 1,144 votes - the first time North West Durham had returned a Conservative since 1950 - in a pattern that played out across the deindustrialised heartlands of the North and Midlands.
The film is built around two long interviews recorded with Laura in spring 2023, after the defeat.
At its centre sits the 2019 Durham Miners' Gala - Laura's speech from the main platform, the media round at the County Hotel, the build up, etc.
Other footage includes Laura's 2017 maiden speech, interviews with constituents about the impacts of Universal Credit, conversations from doorstep campaigning and the night of the 2019 election count in Stanley. Throughout the film the landscape and communities of the Durham Coalfield are a recurring presence.
Through the interviews Laura describes a lifelong experience of being told to “shut up” - at school, in workplaces, then in the Commons - and the significance of that experience for a working-class woman (something she addressed from her maiden speech onwards).
Her two years as an MP offer a very specific kind of evidence: shadow ministerial work on employment rights, a refusal of parliamentary decorum, the use of the Commons as a platform for socialist argument. We are given space to reflect on what was attempted from inside Westminster and what was left of the project after the 2019 election.
Why now
The 2024 general election gave Labour its 'loveless landslide' - a thin mandate on the lowest turnout in a generation. With the recent local elections, Reform are now breaking through in the deindustrialised seats Labour once took for granted. This has only sharpened a question our communities are already living with: with the two-party system looking finished, does the politics of the coalfield now belong to Reform and the right?
Once the film is finished and ready to screen, the next general election probably won't be far off and the ‘Red Wall’ constituencies will again be where that gets decided. A 2027 completion puts the film and the screenings that follow it into that run-up, in the places where the question is most acute.